Western Frontiers of African Art navigates the problems and prospects of prometheusis in creative cultural productions. Artists, writers, musicians, and other creative practitioners share icons, ideas, images, and paraphernalia across cultures, mediums, and disciplines in many ways including borrowing, copying, adoption, adaptation, abbreviation, distortion, and even outright pilfering. Their reasons for sharing creative elements range from admiration to subversion, pedagogical innovation, criticism, hegemony, revenge, anger, fear, malice, and even pathology. Once shared these artistic materials become links and crossroads that complicate creativity and culture with prometheusis. But what is prometheusis? How does it work and how is it evaluated? Drawing on the visual arts, this book elaborates on prometheusis as a general theory of cultural exchange, productivity, and analysis. Examples focus on the intersections and frontiers of western modernity and African art. Moyo Okediji is Director of the Center for Art of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of several books on African art.

In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana’s Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian sovereignty. From the revealing vantage point of the Customs office, Chalfin discovers a fascinating inversion of our assumptions about neoliberal transformation: bureaucrats and local functionaries, government offices, checkpoints, and registries are typically held to be the targets of reform, but Chalfin finds that these figures and sites of authority act as the engine for changes in state sovereignty. Ghana has served as a model of reform for the neoliberal establishment, making it an ideal site for Chalfin to explore why the restructuring of a state on the global periphery portends shifts that occur in all corners of the world. At once a foray into international political economy, politics, and political anthropology, Neoliberal Frontiers is an innovative interdisciplinary leap forward for ethnographic writing, as well as an eloquent addition to the literature on postcolonial Africa.

The American West is mistakenly known as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. This work challenges that view in a chronicle that begins in 1528 and carries through to the present-day black success in politics and the surging interest in multiculturalism.

How does secret knowledge shape how West African arts are created by different makers for disparate audiences? Recognizing that there is a tension between what is seen on the outside and what cannot be seen on the inside, Seeing the Unseen delves into the meaning of objects, assemblages, and performances among the Senufo-Mande people. The awareness of exceptional power and the profound knowledge of the artistic creators is constantly oscillating between what can be seen and what is known by their audiences. This constant negotiation of the mutual recognition of the others' potential agency provides a foundation for a new, compelling model for thinking about how the seen and unseen must operate in arts. The result is an engaging exploration of power associations and the social and political tensions they create through objects and performances.

In The Story of Oklahoma, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves appears as the "most feared U.S. marshal in the Indian country." That Reeves was also an African American who had spent his early life enslaved in Arkansas and Texas made his accomplishments all the more remarkable. Black Gun, Silver Star sifts through fact and legend to discover the truth about one of the most outstanding peace officers in late nineteenth-century America--and perhaps the greatest lawman of the Wild West era. Bucking the odds ("I'm sorry, we didn't keep Black people's history," a clerk at one of Oklahoma's local historical societies answered one query), Art T. Burton traces Reeves from his days of slavery to his Civil War soldiering to his career as a deputy U.S. marshal out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, when he worked under "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker. Fluent in Creek and other regional Native languages, physically powerful, skilled with firearms, and a master of disguise, Reeves was exceptionally adept at apprehending fugitives and outlaws and his exploits were legendary in Oklahoma and Arkansas. In this new edition Burton traces Reeves's presence in the national media of his day as well as his growing modern presence in popular media such as television, movies, comics, and video games.

This edited volume, including contributions from scholars with different areas of specialization, investigates a broad range of methodologies, ideologies and pedagogies focusing on the study of the art of Africa, using theoretical reflections and applications from primitivism to metamodernism. Chapters break the externally imposed boundaries of Africa-related works beyond the conventional fragments of traditional, contemporary and diaspora. The contributions are significantly broad in their methodologies, ideologies and pedagogical coverage; yet, they all address various aspects of African artistic creativity, demonstrating the possibilities for analytical experiments that art history presents to scholars of the discipline today. The Ìwà (character) of each approach is unique; nevertheless, each is useful toward a fuller understanding of African art studies as an independent aspect of art historical research that is a branch or bud of the larger family of art history. The volume respects, highlights and celebrates the distinctiveness of each methodical approach, recognizing its contribution to the overall character or Ìwà of African art studies. The book will be of interest to students in undergraduate or graduate, intermediate or advanced courses as well as scholars in art history and African studies.